The benchmarks in the benchmark game are typically CPU bound, which heavily favors compiled languages for obvious reasons. With regards to what "idiomatic use"

The benchmarks in the benchmark game are typically CPU bound, which heavily favors compiled languages for obvious reasons. With regards to what "idiomatic use" is for Ruby, we could argue that most ruby apps are web backends and most of those spend the majority of their waiting for DB and/or API calls and don't spend all that much doing work in actual Ruby.